As
a youngster, I was a great fan of the stories of Robert Heinlein. I
read them over and over again. My particular favorites were Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel and Beyond This Horizon. Eventually, I became the author of Heinlein in Dimension,
not only the first critical study of Heinlein's fiction, but the very
first book on the work of any modem science fiction writer.

I
loved what was noblest and best in Heinlein as well as anyone, and more
than most. Consequently, watching the solipsistic self-devouring
vampire that Heinlein became in his later years was particularly
painful for me to watch.

It
hurt me to hear of him as a Worldcon Guest of Honor delivering yet
another warning against imminent atomic doom (as late as 1976!) and
being booed from the balcony by people who had once admired him. It
hurt to observe him from a distance as an old man whose interactions
with readers and fans had become contingent upon their making blood
bank donations, as though this were their only possible relevance for
him. And it hurt to see Heinlein taking all of his earlier work and
redefining it, not as various parts of a common Future History, as he
had when he was a young writer, but rather as aspects of a state of
being in which Robert Heinlein and his various clones and avatars --
including the villainous Black Beast, Mellrooney -- were the only
reality acknowledged to exist.

All of that hurt.

In
the days of Heinlein’s decline, struck by the immense disparity between
the man that Heinlein might have become and should have become and the
horror story he did become, I scrawled a line on a scrap of paper and
threw it into the drawer where odd thoughts live. It said:

the agony of a solipsist living in a world he neither likes nor understands

That was as far as I could go toward empathizing with the wreck and forgiving Heinlein.

But
it still didn't answer the question that nagged me most. How could a
man so knowledgeable, so perceptive, so influential and so well-loved,
even to the day he died, ever have ended so badly? I puzzled over that
for years and years and years.

I
should tell you frankly that Heinlein didn't love me as well as I loved
him. What were the reasons? That was one more part of the puzzle.

Well, I offended the man -- no doubt many more times than once. The crucial one was this:

More than twenty-five years ago, while I was researching Heinlein in Dimension,
the widow of a friend of Heinlein’s wrote to tell me of the existence
of correspondence between Heinlein and her husband, and asked me if I
wanted to have a look at Heinlein’s letters. I accepted her offer, but
didn't find anything there that seemed relevant to the critical
examination of his fiction that I was writing. Presuming I had
done nothing improper, I made no secret of the fact that I had
seen those letters. But when Heinlein was told of it, his
immediate reaction -- before checking the facts, before reading what I
had written -- was to accuse Advent, my publisher, of bad faith and
threaten them with a lawsuit, and to terminate his friendship with Earl
Kemp, one of the SF fans who ran Advent, on whose couch Heinlein was
used to sleeping when he visited Chicago.

I
met Heinlein for the first and only time on a public occasion in New
York ten years later, and by a substantial margin it was the oddest
meeting I've ever had with another writer. First, while Heinlein was
busy autographing books, I introduced myself to Mrs. Heinlein. She gave
me the cut direct, turning her back on me and walking away. I know that
nobody does that anymore, but, by golly, she did it.

Then,
when I had the opportunity, I introduced myself at last to the man who
had been a stimulus, a model, and a hero to my younger self. Heinlein
stood. His face turned dark red and a vein throbbed in his temple. (The
simulation of extreme rage was a mode Heinlein could assume at will,
and which he was proud enough of to recommend to others as a device for
getting one’s own way.) In a tone that brooked no compromise, he said,
"'Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail'" and pointed the way to
the door.

It
was a surreal moment, completely out of proportion to any offense that
I -- a non-gentleman, perhaps, like all scholarly readers of other
people’s letters, but one who had never meant Heinlein any harm and
never done him any -- might have unintentionally committed a decade
earlier. And all the odder it seems, too, when you stop to think that
Heinlein was quoting Henry Stimson, the Secretary of State who, when the
U.S. cracked Japan’s most secret code in the days before World War II,
had wanted to hear no more about it. Did he think he was playing the
role of Stimson or of Japan, or somehow both at once?

So
continuingly unforgiving (and skittish) was Heinlein where I was
concerned that another dozen years later he would refuse to read
through the relevant pages of The World Beyond the Hill
before publication -- but via Mrs. Heinlein would threaten the
publisher, Tarcher of Los Angeles, with a lawsuit should there turn out
to be anything in our book to which he took exception.

Two
different publishers threatened with lawsuit. Two books published
anyway. And no actual lawsuits ... nor reason for any. It is enough
to set you wondering what Heinlein thought he was trying to accomplish,
and why.

If
it was to attempt to affect what was said about him and his work it
would not have been the first time. Perhaps the most blatant example of
this I know of happened to Sam Moskowitz back in the days when he was
writing the earliest formal portrait of Heinlein and his work, which
would later appear in expanded form as a chapter in his book Seekers of Tomorrow. As
the climax of his research, Moskowitz sent Heinlein fifteen questions.
And Heinlein was good enough to answer them all in a letter that was
fully as long as Moskowitz’s eventual essay. However, Heinlein then
added the proviso that of course Moskowitz wouldn't use anything he’d
been told. Caught in the monkey trap of wanting to be considered a
gentleman, Sam was effectively prevented from saying even those things
he had previously known. What’s more, Sam actually admired Heinlein for
this ploy. He thought it was a "clever trick."

There
was a price to be paid by anyone who did transgress the rules Heinlein
made, or who even disagreed with him. This was to become an un-person.
Even before it happened to me, it was disconcerting to my younger self,
as I was handed along by friends of Heinlein to closer friends of
Heinlein, to run into more than one dead end and a story that went like
this: "It’s true that Bob Heinlein and I used to be good friends. But
then we had a disagreement, and as a result -- through his choice and
not mine -- we no longer see each other.”

I have an image of a tactically enraged Heinlein ever and again pointing the way to the door.

It
is clear now that hiding behind various kinds of barriers, manipulation
of what was to be known and said about him, and threats of extreme
displeasure toward all dissenters were a regular pattern of conduct for
Robert Heinlein long before he was plagued by the uncomfortable
notoriety brought his way by the success of Stranger in at Strange Land.
But why did he come to resort to all of this anticipatory dodging for
cover, clever trickery and roaring thunder? What could it have been
that he was so determined never to permit himself to hear?

Was it what Admiral Caleb Laning ultimately did say to him?

Cal Laning was the dedicatee (together with his wife and children) of Beyond This Horizon,
Robert Heinlein’s first published and most frankly philosophical adult
novel. Laning and Heinlein went way back together -- all the way to
their earliest days at the Naval Academy. They’d done everything
together then, from chasing girls to making a private compact between
them to keep on searching for the meaning of life. They called this aim
"the Quest."

Eventually,
however, when Heinlein had become an old man of vast and easily
offended dignity whose mail was screened and who lived behind fences no
hippie could penetrate, he and Laning would fall out in a confrontation
that had Heinlein thumping his cane, glaring at Laning, and saying,
"How dare you speak to me that way, sir!"

Now
what in the world could Cal Laning have said to Bob Heinlein that could
have gotten him that upset? I didn't get the answer to that one from
the person who heard this story from Laning and then told it to me. But
I've wondered about it. I have wondered.

After
all, it is one thing for Heinlein to have brushed aside an importunate
young fan critic like me, or to have brought a relatively recent
friendship with a Colorado Springs mystery writer to an abrupt end. But
the relationship with Laning went back to the days before the money,
before the fame, before the dignity, even before the SF writing. And
how could you get miffed at this late date with the kind of running
buddy you once attempted to join the Jesuits with when you both were
young and foolish? The guy you sent a keeper copy of your first (and to
this day still unpublished) long Future History manuscript?

What
might Caleb Laning have said to him that Heinlein couldn't laugh off
but had to defend against with furious thumpings and glares and
how-dare-you-sirs? It must have been something devastating.

But
I was told one opinion of Admiral Laning’s that might fit the bill and
be the heart-striking truth that Heinlein secretly feared to face --
like that revelation of his ineradicable second-ratedness which so
devastates the strike leader in Heinlein’s early story, "The Roads Must
Roll.”

It was Admiral Laning’s feeling that Heinlein had abandoned the Quest after Beyond This Horizon.
If he hadn't said so, and hadn't said so, and hadn't said so, and then
at last he said so, it seems possible that it could have burst upon
Heinlein as an affront. And all the more intolerable because it
happened to be true.

There
is evidence of its truth in Heinlein’s own letters. I mean by this, of
course, the ones published after his death under the title Grumbles from the Grave.

As
readers will already be aware -- that is, all those readers who eagerly
picked up this book for the same reason that I accepted a look at those
Heinlein letters twenty-five years ago: the hope that his
correspondence might shed some light upon the stories and upon the man
-- this collection of Heinlein’s business letters, selected, edited and
arranged by Mrs. Heinlein, is generally unrevealing.

There
is one major exception to this, however. For whatever reason, the early
letters between Heinlein and John Campbell that are printed here have
been left relatively complete and unimproved by editorial handling, and
now and again remarks are made that not only do give us some indication
of who Heinlein thought he was and what he thought he was doing, but go
a long way toward answering my puzzlement about how and why Heinlein
came to go so wrong.

In
Admiral Laning’s language, you could very well say that in these
letters is recorded the moment when Heinlein abandoned the Quest. And
admitted as much, at least one time.

The Robert Heinlein who first vaulted over the heads of all other writers to become the brightest star of the pre-war Campbell Astounding was a desperate, driven, frustrated and unhappy man.

Through
the Twenties and Thirties, he had pressed his Quest in every direction.
He had studied engineering and mathematics. He had looked into Masonry
and witchcraft. He had pushed beyond the miraculous into new dimensions
of being with the writings of P. D. Ouspensky, and he had played around
with the occult masters of Mt. Shasta. He had taken seminars in General
Semantics with Alfred Korzybski, and he had even met his early hero, H.
G. Wells, and asked him to autograph his cherished copy of When the Sleeper Wakes.

But
none of these had provided him with the solution to the mystery of life
that he was seeking. The nearest had been Wells. Heinlein’s first
answer to the challenge of the Quest had been to try to become a man of
competence, an operator and director of society, a Wellsian Samurai.
And he had identified this superior calling with his appointment to the
Naval Academy and his commissioning as an officer.

But
worldly power and recognition cannot be a complete and sufficient
answer to the goals of the Quest -- or else Genghis Khan and Hitler
would be remembered today as sages rather than Chuang-Tzu and Jalaludin
Rumi. And during the Thirties, the limitations of his first answer were
demonstrated to Heinlein over and over again.

Heinlein
was as competent a man as he could make himself -- and where he wasn't
all that competent he could puff and blow and fake his way through. But
again and again he had tried to be a Big Time Operator, and time and
again he had failed.

He
hadn't risen in the Navy. Instead he had been retired when he was still
in his twenties after developing tuberculosis. What a blow that had
been!

He hadn't succeeded in graduate school and an academic career -- again he had gotten sick and had to drop out.

He hadn't succeeded in mining or in real estate. In fact, he’d been a flop, and maybe even a fool.

Most recently, he had been rejected by California voters in a party primary election for a seat in the state legislature.

In the realm of action and obvious result, Heinlein was a total bust.

So
what should he do? What were his brains and talents for? He had so much
to ofter, and yet he just couldn't seem to get anywhere at all. What
was his life about?

It was at this point that Heinlein took up science fiction writing. It was an act fraught with ambivalence from the beginning.

From
the moment that he had first discovered this limit-testing literature
as a psychically-oppressed kid in Kansas City, Heinlein had read SF
assiduously. It has been highly influential upon him -- particularly
Wells. SF had given him a basis by which to lever himself out of the
limitations of his Bible-thumping surroundings and become a seeker of
truth. And that both he and Cal Laning read science fiction in a
society and a Navy which generally did not was a major bond between
them.

At
the same time, in contemporary America science fiction was not only
looked at askance for its content, it was a pulp magazine literature,
and the pulps were déclassé. No matter how well-qualified Heinlein
might be to become an SF writer, telling stories for the pulps was
nothing at all like any goal he had ever set for himself.

Heinlein
backed himself into doing it, however. He had the debt that he had
incurred in his unsuccessful bid for office to pay off. It was hardly
as much as a thousand dollars, but he told himself that discharging the
debt as soon as possible was a matter of honor, and that writing
stories seemed a way for a smart, science-fiction-savvy, but
half·invalid fellow like himself to generate the money he needed.

That
there was something disjointed about his taking up SF writing, however,
something that he wasn't later able to look at quite squarely, is
apparent in the tale Heinlein would persist in telling about how it
came about. He would say that he wrote his first short story,
"Life-Line,” in response to a story contest in Thrilling Wonder Stories,
the prize for which was $50. When he was done, however, the story had
seemed too good for a pulp, so he had submitted it to the slick magazine
Collier’s. When they returned it, he’d noticed that the pay rate at Astounding of a penny a word would earn him more than first prize at Thrilling Wonder, so he had sent it to Campbell who bought "Life-Line" for $70. A clear win for Robert Heinlein.

The only trouble is that Heinlein didn't write "Life-Line” until the contest in Thrilling Wonder Stories was over and done with, and the winning story, Alfred Bester’s "The Broken Axiom,” had already been published. What is more, Collier's
was never a market for science fiction stories, no matter how
contemporary in setting or how well-written. It would seem that beneath
all the misdirection and self-congratulation with which Heinlein came
to lacquer the event, writing for John Campbell’s magazines was what he
had actually had in mind when he sat down to turn out his first short
story.

And
after a very brief apprenticeship, Heinlein found Campbell’s range so
well that he was able to sell him everything he wrote. All of
Heinlein’s searching, all of his knowledge, all of his frustration, and
all of his pent-up energy, he poured out in science fiction form. The
Quest was written large in those early stories. Over and over they ask,
what does the man of competence and truthseeking do? And what kind of
society will allow him to do it?

At
the same time, these stories themselves were highly frustrated. Again
and again, they looked for an answer to the Quest at the level of the
Samurai, the responsible caretaker of lesser men, and again and again
they concluded with failure, breakdown, loss of nerve, even death.
Heinlein would think of these stories as tragedies.

However, as successful with Campbell and the readers of Astounding
as his stories were -- particularly after the publication of a chart
which Heinlein had been keeping on his wall revealed that all of the
stories published under his own name were placed against a common
background of future development -- Heinlein himself continued to be
of two minds about what he was doing.

Oh,
the ambivalence he felt! Here he was, writing his passionate, powerful,
questioning, revolutionary, and highly autobiographical stories. Story
after story after story, as fast as he could get them down on paper.
And yet at the same time he was ready to tell Anthony Boucher that he
was only writing because it was an easy way of making money that he had
happened to fall into, and that he planned to quit as soon as his debt
was paid off.

Only, of course, he didn't quit after the debt was paid off. He kept on writing feverishly.

The ambivalence was written large in Grumbles from the Grave.
For instance, Heinlein would regularly bad-mouth his own stories to
Campbell. He suggested that "If This Goes On--,” his first serial, was
hack. And he said that "By His Bootstraps," his brilliantly original
time travel story, was hackwork, too. When Campbell protested that it
wasn't, Heinlein insisted yet again that yes it was. "Cotton candy,” he
said.

At
the same time, of course, this did not stop Heinlein from demanding
Campbell’s top dollar for his work, and declaring that if he got
anything less he would cease to write: "As long as you pay anyone a
cent and a half, I want it. If my stuff starts slipping and is no
longer worth top rates, I prefer to quit rather than start the
downgrade.”

And
Heinlein actually would quit after Campbell rejected his story
"Goldfish Bowl” in the summer of 1941. In a letter dated September 6,
Heinlein told Campbell his reasons. And these were typically
ambivalent, too.

For
one thing, Heinlein said that he had grander, better paying and more
ambitious writing to do. There was a book on monetary theory that he
wanted to write, and another on General Semantics. He was going to
write at least one non-SF novel, maybe. And he had thoughts of writing
for the slicks.

But
then, in almost the next breath Heinlein said that he was tuckered out.
In fact, writing all those SF stories hadn't actually been as casual
and effortless a proposition as he sometimes made out: "Frankly, the
strain is wearing on me. I can still write, but it is a terrific grind
to try each week to be more clever than I was the week before."

And,
in between, Heinlein protested that he had the Quest to attend to: "I
want to be able to stop, sit down and 'invite my soul' for an hour, a
day, or a week, if feel the need for it. I don't know yet what my
principal task in this world is, if I have one, but I do know that I
won't find it through too much hurrying and striving ..."

What
was he actually going to do? That wasn't clear. What was clear was that
now he wasn't going to write any more SF stories -- especially if John
Campbell was going to reject them.

Heinlein’s
quitting didn't last long. Campbell backed down in pretty short order,
not wishing to lose his star writer, and bought "Goldfish Bowl” even
though he really didn't want it. And just that quick, Heinlein
relented. By September 25, not even three weeks after he had given up
SF writing so firmly and finally, he was back talking to Campbell in
these enthusiastic terms about an idea he had for a new SF story:

I
think I've got it. Darned if I don't think so. The serial, I mean --
the one I've been looking for. Like this -- for some time I've been
wandering around in a blue fog, trying to get a theme, a major conflict
suitable for a novel-length S-F story. I wanted it to be fully mature,
adult, dramatic in its possibilities -- and not used before.

The idea itself was this: “In a world that is all peace-and-prosperity, what will men and women have left to struggle for?”

In this idea, Heinlein would find the nucleus of Beyond This Horizon, his longest pre-war effort.

For
the next five or six weeks, Heinlein worked at getting the pieces of
the story to fall into place solidly enough for him to start writing.
He kept Campbell posted on his progress.

At one early point, Heinlein wrote to say: "I've continued research every day and have a stack of notes that
high. I’m going to like this serial, I think." Ten days later, he was
having to take a barbiturate to get to sleep at night because of worry
about the story, but saying, "The idea is grand, wonderful, and I see
more interesting angles to it every day." And another dozen days
thereafter, he was telling Campbell, "I want this story to be high
tragedy rather than horse opera -- full of gore and action as a Greek
tragedy, but tragedy in the Greek sense."

Here
is enthusiasm, serious purpose, and high ambition. Yet as we might
expect by now, when Heinlein actually got down to writing his dramatic,
mature, and original SF story, he quickly took refuge behind his usual
pose that he didn't altogether care about what he was doing, and wasn't
really trying anyway.

In
sending Campbell the first forty pages on November 9, Heinlein invoked
a comic catchphrase of the moment (still echoing on today in old Warner
Bros. cartoons): "Confidentially, it stinks." And when he mailed off
the second portion on November 13, he wrote, "Here is another hunk of
hack."

A hunk of hack? On pumpernickel? The very same story that aspired to be Greek tragedy in science fiction form?

In fact, Beyond This Horizon came out somewhere in between the two.

It
wasn't anything as mediocre and many-times-envisioned as hackwork. But
it was written too fast -- in little more than a month. And it was
awkwardly structured, straining to include pulp action and then
lurching on determinedly after the pulp action ran out because Heinlein
still had things that he wanted to get in.

Nor
was the story anywhere near as concentrated and painful and
Fate-determined as a proper Greek tragedy. And yet it was no negligible
undertaking. It was both highly innovative as science fiction and
Heinlein’s purest presentation of his Quest. More explicitly than any
other story in the whole corpus of science fiction, Beyond this Horizon
would ask the purpose of human life: What should a man do? What is
human life for? What action or knowledge can justify living and
continuing life?

Heinlein’s
protagonist, Hamilton Felix, is a man of uncommon ability in a future
society in which all material wants are satisfied. He is swift and
smart and sure. However, his lack of one crucial talent, a perfect
memory, disqualifies Hamilton from becoming an encyclopedic synthesist
-- one of "the men who knew everything" who direct this society.

Heinlein
had first publicly proposed the work of synthesist in his
Guest-of-Honor speech given at the Third World Science Fiction
Convention in Denver in July. Heinlein had described synthesists then
as "men who make it their business to find out what it is the
specialists have learned and then relay it to the rest of us in
consolidated form so that we can have, if not the details of the
picture, at least the broad outlines of the enormous, incredibly
enormous, mass of data that the human race has gathered." As a pioneer
in this line of work, Heinlein named H. G. Wells -- "so far as I know
the only writer who has ever lived who has tried to draw for the rest
of us a full picture of the whole world, past and future, everything
about us, so we can stand off and get a look at ourselves."

When
Heinlein had set forth his plans to write about monetary theory and
semantics to Campbell in early September, no doubt it had been with
this image of the synthesist in mind. By the time he wrote Beyond This Horizon,
however, his original portrait of the synthesist as someone who learns
and integrates relevant knowledge and then presents it to others for
their own preparation and guidance had become conflated with his
earlier image of the Samurai, the Man in Charge.

And
if Hamilton Felix cannot be one of these masterful persons, what work
is worth doing for someone of his talent and energy in this brave new
future world? All that he can find to occupy himself is to design
flashy trashy gambling games -- " 'silly games for idle people' " --
and live comfortably. But Hamilton is a radically alienated man.

Various solutions to this situation are tried out in the course of Beyond This Horizon.

One
is for Hamilton Felix to look out for himself and do only that which
pleases him or makes his life easier. It is in this vein that he
describes himself as " 'indifferent honest.' " Or, as
Heinlein-the-narrator puts it: "His morals were strictly pragmatic, and
conformed to accepted code as closely as they did only through a shrewd
and imaginative self-interest."

Another
answer briefly proffered is solipsism. In a trippy passage after
Heinlein’s characters have been rendered unconscious by a potentially
deadly gas, there is a suggestion that this world is all an illusion, a
crooked game: "It was always a little hard to remember which position
Himself had played, forgetting that he had played all the parts."

This
might be an intimation of Heinlein-the-author sitting up late at night
after drinking too much coffee and taking too many pep pills, trying to
force his story onward and grinning at himself in the mirror. But
within the story, it is a strange and unsettling line of thought for
Hamilton Felix to entertain, especially since only some of the persons
of the story are acknowledged to have even quasi-reality. Of the rest,
it is said: "That piece was an automatic, some of the pieces had to
be."

But this view is only the conceit of a moment. It flashes upon the page and is gone.

Rather
more space within the story is devoted to the hugger-mugger of a revolt
against the masters of society by conspirators who would enlist
Hamilton Felix and give him a place of power and prominence in the new
order. Instead, however, Hamilton recognizes these men for the
resentful mediocrities they are, and actively works to subvert the
revolution and see it put down.

And
then, and then ... after the almost-revolution has come and gone, in
a portion of the story in which much time passes by in comparatively
little space, the philosopher-kings of Heinlein’s society resolve to
address Hamilton Felix’s question, "What is the meaning of life?", and
to include him as an active participant in this "Great Research"
into the unsolved mysteries. He may not be a synthesist or a
mover-and-shaker, but he can still live a fruitful life pursuing the
Quest.

Here,
a little forced, a little less than fully imagined, is an answer that
is at least a half-step beyond anything Heinlein had previously
proposed: To use the Quest itself as a Way and find meaning in the continuing search for meaning. And to make that search a
fundamental societal project.

However,
this answer -- or its this-worldly equivalent -- wasn't Heinlein’s
personal answer. He still was not ready to surrender his old desire to
be among the special few who are privileged to guide and direct less
able men and women.

That this was so was made manifest soon after Heinlein finished writing Beyond This Horizon.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor in Hawaii designed to wipe out the U.S. Pacific Fleet in a
single blow, and the United States was suddenly an active participant
in World War II.

Heinlein
had been watching the war closely since it started in Europe in
September 1939. And in his Worldcon speech in Denver, he had said: "I
don't suppose I’ll be writing very much longer. Things shaping up the
way they are, I’ll probably have other things that I’ll have to do, a
lot of us here will have other things that we’re going to have to do,
whether we like it or not; and I may not come back to it ..."

Now on December 9, two days after Pearl Harbor, Heinlein wrote the following to John Campbell:

For
the last eighteen months I have often been gay and frequently much
interested in what I was doing, but I have not been happy. There has
been with me, night and day, a gnawing doubt as to the course I was
following. I felt that there was something that I ought to be doing. I
rationalized it, not too successfully, by reminding myself that the
navy knew where I was, knew my abilities, and had the legal power to
call on me if they wanted me. But I felt like a heel. This country has
been very good to me, and the taxpayers have supported me for many
years. I knew when I was sworn in, sixteen years ago, that my services
and if necessary my life were at the disposal of the country; no amount
of rationalization, no amount of reassurance from my friends, could
still my private belief that I ought to be up and doing at this time.

Heinlein
wanted to be of service to his country. He wanted a ship under his
feet, men to command, and a war to fight. That’s what he’d always
craved.

On
December 7, as soon as Heinlein heard that Pearl Harbor had been
attacked, he leaped up to call the Navy to tell them where he was and
that he was available. (And next he called John Campbell.)

First
thing the following morning, December 8, Heinlein presented himself at
San Pedro Naval Base and demanded a physical. He was rejected both for
his history of tuberculosis and for his eyesight. The Navy couldn't use
him.

He
persisted, however. He wouldn't take no for an answer. He tried one
approach after another. He’d even tell Campbell, "I have been
circulating around the offices of local naval activities, trying to
find someone who wants me bad enough to send a dispatch asking for me.
No luck so far."

For
some weeks or even a month thereafter he would continue to speak of his
expectation of "sea orders." But the hope would seem increasingly
forced.

In
fact, the last word had been spoken on December 8. The Navy didn't want
him. And for all his pulling of strings, and prowling from office to
office, and wishful words, Heinlein must have known it early.

What a bitter pill that was.

All
these months of carefully maintained ambivalence, all these months of
pouring his heart out in fiction while telling others that his stories
were only hackwork and cotton candy, had been his way of maintaining
his grip on his dream that the oncoming war would redeem all the wasted
years and wrong turns and fulfill his training, fulfill his love of the
Navy, and fulfill his Wellsian Samurai self-image. And now it was all
ended. He was never going to be what he most desired to be. He wasn't
good enough.

How
humiliating! How painful! In this moment of failure, rejection and
self-loathing, Heinlein’s feelings threatened to overwhelm him. It hurt
so damned much that in order to make it stop hurting, he determined he
wasn't going to care.

He
turned against both the Samurai ideal and the Quest which he identified
with it, and in the most secret part of his heart, he resolved that
henceforth -- like Hamilton Felix in his initial phase of alienation --
he was going to make his own whim and will his first concern. He would
just please himself.

This
negative dedication, this embrace of selfishness, found its expression
in a letter to John Campbell dated December 21, 1941 -- just two weeks
to the day after Pearl Harbor. Here Heinlein would acknowledge that
Hamilton Felix’s problem was in fact his own personal problem. Hamilton
Felix can't be a synthesist -- the one really important job in society.
What does he do? But then Heinlein made it clear that he had arrived at
a different solution for himself than he had for his imagined alter
ego.

Forget
all that he had just said about service and sacrifice. Forget about
ambition. Forget about effort. Henceforth, Robert Heinlein was going to
spend his life having fun.

Here are his words:

Some
of Hamilton Felix’s point of view is autobiographical. I would like to
have been a synthesist, but I am acutely aware that many of my
characteristics are second-rate. I haven't quite got the memory, nor
the integrating ability, nor the physical strength, nor the strength of
character to do the job. I am not depressed about it, but I
know my own shortcomings. I am sufficiently brilliant and sufficiently
imaginative to realize acutely just how superficial my acquaintance
with the world is and to know that I have not the health, ambition, nor
years remaining to me to accomplish what I would like to accomplish.
Don't discount this as false modesty...

I
have just sufficient touch of genius to know that I am not a proper
genius -- and I am not much interested in second prize. In the
meantime, I expect to have quite a lot of fun and do somewhat less
constructive work than I might, if I tried as hard as I could. That
last is not quite correct. I simply don't have the ambition to try as
hard as I might, nor quite the health. But I do have fun!

The liar! The poltroon! The dastard!

Pardon
me, but I just can't help myself. I have too much respect for the
Heinlein who was my teacher and too much love for the Heinlein who was
my inspiration to have either patience or sympathy with the lesser man
who reveals himself in these paragraphs. Here we can see all the
ambivalence of the previous months suddenly crystalizing into a future
commitment to a lifetime of having fun and sliding by. Here is the
Quest abandoned, and the first decisive step taken toward the
critic-avoiding, anger-simulating, friendship-trashing,
bombshelter-building, doom-warning, solipsistic old sybarite that
Heinlein eventually became.

You
say that I’m making too much out of this? One wormy, craven,
self-indulgent, self-excusing passage in a letter written while in the
grip of a severe disappointment in the midst of a dark December all
those years ago couldn't possibly be so decisive, so final, and so
irrevocable an act as to blight and corrupt the course of a whole
subsequent lifetime, could it? Because if it could, then what might you
and I have done to ourselves yesterday without quite noticing that we
were doing it?

And
l answer you -- you and I had better watch our step, my friends. A
devil’s bargain is a devil’s bargain at any time you strike one.

If
you doubt that one was struck, imagine a different Heinlein, one who
instead of resenting the bitter pill he was handed to swallow and
reacting against it by determining to pick up his marbles and go home,
had taken it like a man and drawn a lesson from it. He might have
suddenly seen, in a way that he had never seen before, that being an
officially designated Big Cheese didn't necessarily have anything to do
with the Quest. And he might have resolved then and there that he was
never never going to rest until his society accepted the validity of
his question, "What is the meaning of life?", and put him to work
addressing it.

Or
he might even have concluded that there was no point at all in looking
to society for validation and approval, but just buckled down to the
task of asking relevant questions and seeing where they led. What a
truly interesting and admirable Robert Heinlein we might have had then!

At
the very least, we could have had a science fiction writer who really
tried, who didn't boast of working only three months a year, and who
kept pursuing the Quest. This humbler yet more ambitious Heinlein,
perceiving his work not as mere silly games for idle people, but rather
as the contemporary equivalent of Hamilton Felix’s participation in the
Great Research, might have been capable of writing the truly adult,
truly probing, truly mature SF that the Heinlein we know once dreamed
of writing, but then never did.

Beyond
that, however, if Heinlein had lived up to all that he had proposed or
claimed for himself in the course of 1941, we might have had a true
cultural treasure, a human being as original, useful and funky as H. G.
Wells. Like Wells, Heinlein could have started as a failure and a
tubercular case, and made his initial mark writing attention-catching
SF stories. And then gone on from there to invent a career for himself.
He could have written his book on monetary theory. And his other book
on General Semantics. And many more.

Heinlein
could have been so persistent, so resourceful, and so imaginative in
posing his questions about the meaning of life that our society finally
had to sigh, surrender, and admit them into its sphere of attention.
That’s the kind of work that a synthesist might do, and it could easily
have been Heinlein’s work.

And
what a benefit it would be now to our presently disoriented and
devalued society if it had as a resource the questions that Heinlein
once posed and then dropped about human meaning and human goals rather
than the bloated solipsistic fantasies that he did go on to write!

It
is true that in his letter to Campbell of December 21, Heinlein
protested that while he would have liked to have been a synthesist, he
just didn't have the knowledge, the memory, the integrative ability,
the character, or the quality of genius necessary to do it. And that he
wasn't interested in competing for second prize.

But
this has to be Heinlein’s greatest copout. His model of a synthesist
was H. G. Wells, and Wells was no one with any obvious advantages over
Heinlein. He was a person who had conspicuous limitations in
background, health, stamina, education, personal appearance and
character. He was even given to speaking of himself as a man with a
very ordinary brain.

Wells
was no Wellsian Samurai. He never had official recognition or a
position that would allow him the right to shape society or to order
men about. He just saw a job of work to be done of a nature that no one
else saw, and did it. And the force of his agenda, the power of his
questions, and his persistence in posing them made him a social force
to be reckoned with in the early Twentieth Century.

Heinlein
could have done the same -- or, rather, as well. He had the questions,
he had the ability (do you doubt it?), and he had a vision of the job
of synthesist. And it is these things that are crucial -- not some
self-pitying phony baloney about perfect memory.

In
the area of creative synthesis -- completely self-nominated work for
which there is no precedent, no job description, no qualifying exam,
and, of course, no recognition -- there can't be prizes, no first
place or second. The work is all. And the fact is that Heinlein had the
work in mind, but then elected not to do it.

Instead,
however, he determined to hijack his gifts and his talents -- which
were neither good enough for the Navy nor sufficient for him to be a
synthesist, but were quite good enough to ease his way through life --
and then make a lifetime of pleasure for himself, erected on the firm
foundation of his own second-ratedness!

What a burden to walk around with. No wonder Heinlein had to build his fences so high.

And no wonder, either, that Admiral Laning could have pegged Heinlein’s abandonment of the Quest to this very hour.

As
an indication that Heinlein not only had made a wrong decision and knew
it in his heart, but also felt that he had said too much, there is the
evidence of his next letter to John Campbell in Grumbles from the Grave,
dated January 4, 1942. Here Heinlein went out of his way to pick a
fight with Campbell that was both so bitter and so falsely founded that
if it did not completely end their friendship then and there, did
such damage to their relationship that it would never again recover its
former closeness.

Campbell’s
offense was questioning the competence of the Navy high command in
permitting the Pacific Fleet to be attacked in port and all but
completely destroyed -- a matter about which good men entertain their
doubts even to this day. Campbell also suggested that Heinlein’s
thinking was compartmentalized, that while he could be thoughtfully
critical about most subjects, he apparently could not be so about this
one.

Heinlein’s
answer to this was to wave the flag, to accuse Campbell of attempting
to induce doubt in him, and to threaten him with the authority and
power of the law. He wrote:

As
an intelligent and educated man, you have a responsibility to your less
gifted fellow citizens to be a steady and morale-building influence at
this time. Your letters do not indicate that you are being such.... It
may not have occurred to you that I am a member of the armed forces of
the United States at the present moment awaiting orders, for sea duty I
hope. Such comments as you have made to me might very well damage the
morale of a member of the armed forces by shaking confidence in his
superior officers. There happens to be a federal law forbidding any
talk in wartime to a member of the armed forces which might tend
to destroy morale in just that fashion -- a law passed by Congress and
not just a departmental regulation. It so happens that I am
sufficiently hardheaded, tough-minded, and conceited not to be much
influenced by your opinion of the high command. I think I know more
about the high command than you do. Nevertheless, you were not entitled
to take the chance of shaking my confidence, my willingness to fight.
And you should guard your talk in the future. It might, firsthand,
secondhand, or thirdhand, influence some enlisted man who had not the
armoring to his morale that years of indoctrination gives me.

l’ll stop there because you have the idea. Heinlein didn't stop, however. He continued in this vein.

But
then you have to ask why Heinlein might be afraid that his confidence
and willingness to fight could be shakable. And why he was so adamant
that the competence of the Navy high command should not be called into
question.

Heinlein’s
sea orders never did arrive. He never fought in the war. And it never
actually made any difference to anybody’s willingness to fight that
John W. Campbell and half of America thought the Navy brass had screwed
up at Pearl Harbor.

Heinlein
spent the war cooling his heels in Philadelphia, working at a job as a
civilian engineer at the Navy Yard which his old service friends had
arranged for him and bullying a young lsaac Asimov, whom he’d convinced
to work there, too.

After
the war, for lack of anything better to do, Heinlein took up science
fiction writing again. But he didn't submit work to John Campbell. And
the stories that he did write were not about the Quest, as before, but
about lesser matters like performance of duty, the recovery of lost
nerve, and dying with a song on one’s lips.

From
there, he continued along the path he had laid out for himself in
December 1941, until he became what he ultimately did become.

What an almost-great man that man was! And what a mellrooney he managed to make of himself.